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Cardano, Girolamo (1501 - 1576)

To throw in a fair game at Hazards only three-spots, when something great is at stake, or some business is the hazard, is a natural occurrence and deserves to be so deemed; and even when they come up the same way for a second time if the throw be repeated. If the third and fourth plays are the same, surely there is occasion for suspicion on the part of a prudent man.

De Vita Propria Liber.

Caballero, James

I advise my students
to listen carefully
the moment they
decide to take no
more mathematics
courses. They might
be able to hear the
sound of closing
doors.

Everybody a
mathematician?, CAIP
Quarterly 2 (Fall,
1989).

Carl Friedrich Gauss

It is not knowledge,
but the act of
learning, not
possession but the
act of getting
there, which grants
the greatest
enjoyment. When I
have clarified and
exhausted a subject,
then I turn away
from it, in order to
go into darkness
again; the never
satisfied man is so
strange if he has
completed a
structure, then it
is not in order to
dwell in it
peacefully, but in
order to begin
another. I imagine
the world conqueror
must feel thus, who,
after one kingdom is
scarcely conquered,
stretched out his
arms for others.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Charles Babbage (1864)

Every game of skill
is susceptible of
being played by an
automaton.

The Difference
Engine, by Doron
Swade, Viking, 2000

Charles Babbage

[To the poet
Tennyson:]
Sir: In your
otherwise beautiful
poem 'The Vision of
Sin' there is a
verse which reads --
'Every moment dies a
man, Every moment
one is born.' It
must be manifest
that if this were
true, the population
of the world would
be at a standstill
... I would suggest
that in the next
edition of your poem
you have it read --
'Every moment dies a
man, Every moment 1
1/16 is born.' The
actual figure is so
long I cannot get it
onto a line, but I
believe the figure 1
1/16 will be
sufficiently
accurate for poetry.